You Shouldn’t Just ‘Dabble’ in SEO If You Want Your Business To Grow Sustainably
One of the common phrases we hear from potential clients is “We want to invest in search engine optimisation, but we want to start off small until we see results”. Whilst this does, in their mind, make total businesses sense, it is important to realise that SEO works very differently from other marketing techniques.
When deciding whether or not to invest in SEO, it is best to remember the saying “slow and steady wins the race”. As much as we wish search engine optimisation was a magical method that improves web rankings with a flick of a switch, that unfortunately is not the case.
You should sit down and establish what your budget is, what your long-term business goals are and what your competition is doing regarding SEO, this will help to decide whether SEO is going to benefit your business. If you are going to need to use a lot of money and resources to reach your goals and compete with other businesses, but only have enough for a short term campaign, then you may want to reconsider investing it elsewhere.
It is understandable that business owners should want to see a good ROI for their money and time, but search engine optimisation is a measurable and sustainable method of marketing which will provide you with results in terms of traffic, sales and brand recognition over many months and even years.
For those expecting huge results on day 1 or perhaps even day 80, this isn’t realistic. SEO requires commitment to content, link building and data analytics which marry together to help you achieve your business goals.
How can my business get the most out of SEO?
A crucial starting point for SEO is content.
The content that you are publishing on your site should be unique, engaging, well written and relevant to your industry and/or services. By having recent and relevant content on your website, Google will see that you are active and that you are an expert in your field which in time can help improve your rankings.
In addition to showing Google that you are up to date, good quality content will appeal to users. This in turn will help you to increase the length of your page views and will encourage visitors to your site to share or link back to your content, helping to build up a better, more sustainable linking profile.
To kickstart your strategy, and to ease the pain of waiting for SEO to start making money, you should look at how you can create a comprehensive strategy that uses other online marketing techniques such as paid search and social media advertising.
Both techniques can be a bit speedier in their return and the results are easy to track. They can drive steady traffic and sales whilst also giving other helpful metrics such as keywords to target and the type of audience that your content needs to appeal to, but these channels can waste money very quickly if not managed correctly.
If long term success is your goal, SEO is a long-term strategy. So, either do it properly and for the long haul or don’t bother at all. Look at profit margins, competition, your budget and business aims and work out if it’s worth it or not. If you just dabble and stop and start, every few months you will never benefit fully from this channel and it will be a complete waste of money.
If you’d like more help and guidance with improving your search engine visibility, get in contact with a member of our team today and see how we can help grow your business sustainably.
